Re-Founding: When an Organisation Needs to Relearn Itself
Founding stories get told and retold — the garage, the breakthrough, the early team. But somewhere along the way, every organisation begins accumulating layers: new markets, new people, new pressures, new habits. And over time, the original sense of clarity becomes blurred.
That’s often when a company needs a re-founding — not a dramatic reinvention, but a deliberate opportunity to pause, gather the right people, and decide again who it is and how it chooses.
Why Re-Founding Is Becoming More Common
In its recent article “When companies lose their way”, The Economist describes how many organisations slip, not because of one big mistake, but because “a series of small choices gradually pulls them off course”¹.
The remedy, it suggests, isn’t cosmetic change — it’s a return to the essential. A moment of organisational self-recognition.
This aligns with what you increasingly see across industries:
complexity has outgrown the old decision logic.
Strategies multiply. Priorities compete. Teams interpret the mission differently. And leadership feels the weight of having to reconcile it all.
A re-founding creates the conditions to do that reconciliation intentionally, rather than reactively.
The Subtle Power of Bringing People Together
What distinguishes re-founding from a reorg or a strategy refresh is surprisingly simple:
people come together to re-articulate what matters.
Not in a performative away-day sense, but in a structured, honest one.
These conversations often revolve around three deceptively basic questions:
What is our vision now — in today’s context, not yesterday’s?
What are the priorities that should guide us, and which ones have quietly expired?
What decision frameworks will help us act consistently, even when everything around us is uncertain?
When these questions are answered collectively, alignment becomes a by-product — not a mandate.
Research on organisational renewal consistently shows that shared sense-making is one of the strongest predictors of successful transformation². People aren’t just informed of change; they participate in the logic of it.
Why Decision Frameworks Matter in Re-Founding
Decision architecture is the silent infrastructure of any organisation. It shapes:
which ideas get attention
which risks get taken
which opportunities feel realistic
and ultimately, what the organisation becomes
In periods of drift, decision-making becomes inconsistent: different teams use different criteria, legacy assumptions go unquestioned, and priorities proliferate.
A re-founding invites the organisation to design its choices again:
What principles guide trade-offs?
How do we prioritise in a way people understand?
What’s the shared language for evaluating opportunities or saying no?
Which decisions genuinely belong on the leadership table, and which don’t?
These re-designed structures quietly unlock coherence.
They let teams act with autonomy and alignment.
They turn vision into practice.
Examples of Re-Founding Done Well
Microsoft’s Cultural Reset
When Satya Nadella took over, Microsoft didn’t just “shift strategy.” It re-centered the organisation around curiosity, learning, and a shared sense of purpose — not as slogans, but as decision filters. This reset allowed teams to coordinate differently, innovate differently, and ultimately rebuild momentum³.
LEGO’s Return to Its Core System
In the early 2000s, LEGO’s problem wasn’t lack of creativity but lack of focus. By gathering teams across the organisation and reaffirming the core idea of “systematic creativity,” LEGO regained discipline in decisions, investments, and product design — a quiet but deeply effective re-founding⁴.
Re-Founding as a Moment of Re-Alignment
Re-founding doesn’t require crisis.
It requires recognition.
Recognition that the organisation has grown, that people interpret the mission differently, that the world has changed — and that clarity doesn’t just happen on its own. It has to be constructed.
Often, the most powerful thing an organisation can do is simply to pause long enough to talk, prioritise, and decide again with intention.
That’s what a re-founding is:
a second origin story — written with more voices, more context, and more honesty than the first.
If you're interested in a facilitated Decision Spike to help, you can read more about it here
References
The Economist. “When companies lose their way.” (2025). Accessible summary via:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/the-economist_when-companies-lose-their-way-activity-7398752425882505216-Y-bjMarshak, R. & Grant, J. An Empirical Vision for Organisational Renewal: Self-Reflection and Transformation.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301595384Nadella, Satya. Hit Refresh. HarperCollins, 2017 — plus analysis across HBR and Microsoft case studies.
Robertson, David. Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation. Crown Business, 2013.
